5 Things You Didn't Know: Playboy

The emergence — and instant success — of Playboy magazine in 1953 was no accident: Its timing was perfect, arriving primed and ready on the porch just as the morning newspaper had for decades before. The Victorian era ended with the First World War, which was followed by global economic collapse and then the Second World War. Men emerged from these times utterly disillusioned and ready to reject the role of breadwinner, to renounce that responsibility and assume a leisure consumerism.

However, consumerism — shopping for yourself, indulging in that kind of vanity — was at the time reserved largely for women, and decidedly effeminate for men. It was not the lifestyle associated with the strong heterosexual male. However, anyone who reads Playboy’s first issue can very easily hear Hugh Hefner’s staunch defense of this emerging lifestyle:

“We don’t mind telling you in advance — we plan on spending most of our time inside. We like our apartment…. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzche, jazz, sex.”

With that mission statement in mind, here are five things you didn’t know about Playboy, the magazine that helped to launch a revolution.

1- Playboy wasn’t originally called Playboy

What we know as Playboy today came very close to being known as Stag Party, which perhaps only seems awful in posterity. Hefner’s preferred title was stifled by another magazine, an outdoor rag called Stag, which threatened him with legal action if he went ahead with that title.

The name Playboy came at the suggestion of Hefner’s associate Eldon Sellers, whose mother had previously been employed at the then-defunct Playboy Automotive Company.

2- Playboy hosted TV’s first desegregated program

Playboy’s Penthouse premiered in late October 1959 and it served a few purposes — among them it was hoped that the show would introduce Hefner to a wider audience and eliminate any notion that he was little more than a perverted smut peddler. Granted, he was not the most engaging host, but he did explain the format on air to comedian Lenny Bruce, saying, “We're trying to build the personality of the show out of the magazine itself and make the thing a sort of sophisticated weekly get-together of the people that we dig and the people who dig us.”

To that end, Hefner featured blacks and whites “partying” together, becoming the first nationally televised show to do so. Playboy’s Penthouse featured such acts as Ella Fitzgerald, Nat "King" Cole and Sarah Vaughn.

3- The Playboy rabbit head is hidden on almost every cover

The tradition of concealing Playboy’s rabbit head logo on the magazine’s cover began in the 1960s as nothing more than “a lighthearted way to challenge readers.” By the mid-1970s, Playboy’s headquarters were inundated with so many requests from bewildered readers who searched and searched but could not find it that the editors began offering hints on where to find him on the contents page. But even before the popular draw of the rabbit head, Playboy’s mascot was so recognizable that a reader was able to address a letter to Playboy’s headquarters by simply drawing the mascot on the envelope.